This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇨🇦 Canada winning a Pan-American title in women’s 3x3 basketball

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning a Pan-American title in men’s 3x3 basketball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing South Africa’s record in men’s test cricket

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Caroline Harvey’s early burst

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇨🇦 Canada win the 2026 women’s FIBA 3x3 AmeriCup

With a view to accelerating the growth of 3x3 basketball in Central America, FIBA awarded hosting rights to the AmeriCup in both 2026 and 2027 to El Salvador. (The country’s national teams had never before competed in the tournament.)

The home team put in a creditable showing on the women’s side, making the quarter-finals before falling to Cuba. For the third year in a row, the final was between the USA (7.1) and Canada (6.4); as they did in 2024, the Canadians took the win here.

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 men’s FIBA 3x3 AmeriCup

El Salvador also made the men’s quarter-finals. After squeezing past the Dominican Republic in their pool, they lost to Canada (5.9) — who ended up in second place behind the USA (6.6) and former college basketball star Jimmer Fredette.

Over the competition’s six-year history, this was only the second time that the men’s and women’s finals were contested by the same two nations; Puerto Rico (6.0) have appeared in the most men’s finals after the US, but lost to Canada in this year’s semis.

📊 Chart of the week: Are South Africa the new kings of test cricket?

In the end, it was comprehensive. South Africa’s men’s test cricket team won the second and third matches of their October series against Australia by a big margin; in the process, they reinforced their formidable home record in the format.

Since the institution of the World Test Championship in 2019, South Africa have won 73% of the fixtures they’ve hosted in the competition. Even if their rivals are past their peak, to triumph in this three-match series was particularly impressive: Australia are the only WTC nation to have won more than 50% of their away fixtures. South Africa don’t yet top my Rank the Nations ratings, but with five more home matches in the next few months it might not be long before they wrest the crown from the Aussies.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Caroline Harvey’s early burst

Canada have refreshed their squad for the women’s ice hockey World Championship this month, picking 12 players who weren’t at February’s Olympics — including several students. Will this influx of talent help close the gap between them and the USA?

Their trouble is that the US already have an amazing young core themselves. One of their best players — defender Caroline Harvey, who was MVP in Milan — hasn’t yet played professionally either. Late in their first warm-up against Canada last week, the 24-year-old hit the gas as she carried the puck over the blue line. With a bit of time and space, she turned towards the net and fizzed a pass towards the back post; one lucky bounce off a Canadian skate was all it took for her to be credited with a goal.

You can watch a replay of this goal on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Athletic, Laia Cervelló Herrero reported from a soccer club in Mallorca where three current Spain internationals (and 2026 Ballon d’Or nominees) began their careers. Cata Coll, Patri Guijarro and Mariona Caldentey all started out at UD Collerense before moving on to Barça Femení; Coll and Caldentey were both part of the national team’s famous win over England in 2023. One of the club’s founding members said: “The day they lifted the World Cup, I had a proper cry.”

• For Yahoo! Sports, Dylan Hernandez wrote about 18-year-old baseball player Shoki Oda, who is planning to bypass the typical professional pathway in Japan and move directly to the USA to accelerate his development. A handful of other prospects have chosen similar paths, but none of them have been rated as highly as Oda. Where in MLB might he end up? Hernandez points out that “[h]e follows one major league team on Instagram: The Dodgers.”

• For Netball Scoop, Jenny Sinclair interviewed Australia women’s coach Stacey Marinkovich — before her team lost the 2026 ‘Constellation Cup’ series 3-1 to New Zealand. Their rivals also won gold at the Commonwealth Games in August; Australia were knocked out by Jamaica in the semis. (“I think we’ve all been very aware of how close international netball has been,” Marinkovich said.) The Diamonds don’t have any more matches scheduled before next year’s World Cup.

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the shape of the international sporting calendar

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Grace Nweke’s prime position

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

📊 Chart of the week: Is there really an ‘October lull’ in the international calendar?

One great thing about the format of the newsletter this year: most editions structure themselves. The calendar hasn’t been much help this week, though; outside of rugby league — where the World Cup is only just underway — it feels like a quiet moment.

Is an ‘October lull’ for competitive international fixtures typical? To recap, I omit friendlies, invitational tournaments and bilateral series from the Rank the Nations database. (This allows me to assess teams based on broadly comparable sets of fixtures.) That leaves matches at major global and continental competitions; across the 30 team ball sports I track, there have been nearly 22,000 such fixtures since international sport resumed after the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020.

When do those fixtures tend to fall? Plotting the distribution for the four complete years I have on record makes it clear that activity does tend to taper off at this point in the calendar. Between 2022 and 2025, 60% of the competitive fixtures that I tracked were scheduled in the five months from May to September. Put another way, more than half of a typical year’s international sporting activity falls in a peak window that represents about 40% of that time period.

What’s left to look forward to in 2026, then? As well as both rugby league World Cups, over the next three months I’ll also be writing about — among other things — the conclusion of the first edition of men’s rugby union’s Nations Championship, the women’s ice hockey World Championship, the baseball5 World Cup and women’s handball Euro 2026. It might start slowing down as the end of the year approaches, but the international sporting calendar never really stops.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Grace Nweke’s prime position

I find netball really interesting because of the degree of specialisation that its rules codify; here, the phrase ‘shooters shoot’ applies more literally than it does in almost any other sporting context.

Even in a sport full of specialists, Grace Nweke stands out: the 24-year-old scored 40 of New Zealand‘s 56 goals in their recent win over Australia. But ‘goal shooters’ do so much crucial work before receiving the ball; in the second quarter — with one of her teammates in possession at the edge of the final third — Nweke simply stands still and lets her marker drift in front of her. After she leaps to corral a great feed and lands a few feet from the post, what’s left is the easy part of playing at her position.

You can watch a replay of this goal on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• On Substack, Kyle Cushman wrote about the roster that Canada will take to the women’s ice hockey World Championship in Denmark next month. After a loss to the USA in the gold-medal match at the Winter Olympics earlier this year, their new management team has selected 12 new players for the tournament. Rosalie Tremblay — who has just turned 18 — is one of four teenagers involved; they all play in the US college system, along with 20-year-old forward Caitlin Kraemer.

• For The Guardian, Rich Laverty reported on the ‘JFA Academy’ — the system of soccer schools set up by Japan’s national governing body — and its impact on the women’s national team. (They won the 2011 World Cup, and reached the final again in 2015.) One recent graduate is midfielder Manaka Hayashi, who now plays for a top club in Italy. She told Laverty about the Academy’s technical focus: “We had to be skilful on the ball to become better than other countries.”

• For Rugby World, Alex Spink spoke to Shaun Edwards about his new role as defence coach with the Argentina men’s rugby union team and his last full-time job with France. He was frank about his marginalisation within the French set-up during the Six Nations (“I didn’t do much coaching in that tournament because someone above me wanted to do it”) and why he chose to jump straight back into the international game: “I’m like everybody else, I want to go to the World Cup.”

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning a Pan-American title in women’s lacrosse sixes

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning a Pan-American title in men’s lacrosse sixes

• 🇯🇵 Japan winning an Asian title in women’s lacrosse sixes

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing rugby league’s approach to player eligibility

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: João Cancelo’s attention-grabber

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 Women’s Pan-American Sixes Lacrosse Championship

The introduction of lacrosse sixes in 2021 was great for one nation in particular. Canada had long trailed behind the USA in women’s field lacrosse, but beat them to gold the first time the small-sided version was played at the World Games in 2022.

However, the tables are starting to turn as the format’s Olympic debut approaches. After winning three of their first four competitive fixtures against the USA (7.8), I now make it four consecutive losses to their neighbours for Canada (7.5) — including the decider at the 2025 World Games, and at this year’s Pan-American Championship. At home in Oshawa earlier this month, the Canadian team comfortably swept their group before falling to the Americans 15-14 in the final.

Regardless, it’s a good sign for the Olympics that the landscape in women’s sixes still looks more competitive than it does in international field lacrosse. In the traditional format, the USA are unbeaten in competitive action since 2022 and have scored 80% of the goals in their games over this period; in sixes, they have lost a number of times and have a markedly lower ‘goal share’. In contrast, Canada’s goal share actually increases in the newer version of the sport: it’s 66% in field lacrosse, but 69% here.

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 Men’s Pan-American Sixes Lacrosse Championship

The men’s final at this year’s Pan-American Sixes Championship was also a one-goal win for the USA (7.4). Canada (8.2), however, remain the top team in my rankings — even after that heartbreaking last-minute defeat.

The bronze-medal games were contested by the same nations in both the men’s and women’s tournaments, too. They didn’t prevail in the latter, but the Haudenosaunee (5.6) beat Puerto Rico (3.5) to finish third in the former.

🇯🇵 Japan win the 2026 Women’s Asia-Pacific Sixes Lacrosse Championship

After the two North American nations we’ve already discussed, three teams from the Asia-Pacific region appear next in the women’s sixes rankings. Their continental title has just been decided, too: Japan (5.6) upset Australia (6.6) to take gold.

Both of those two teams put in pretty good performances at the 2025 World Games, finishing fourth and third respectively. However, their four matches against the USA and Canada were one-sided: in aggregate, they were outscored 90 goals to 32.

📊 Chart of the week: Is rugby league’s idea of ‘nationality’ healthier?

While it’s strictly defined in other contexts, sport can treat ‘nationality’ as something more fluid and multifaceted. Take rugby league as an example: 18 players at this year’s Men’s World Cup have represented more than one nation during their careers.

League allows players to switch from a team in ‘Tier 1’ — Australia, England and New Zealand — to a ‘Tier 2’ or ‘Tier 3’ nation each year. Along with fairly liberal eligibility rules in general, this helps the game’s governing body make international play more competitive. But it’s good for players, too: Tyson Frizell — of Wales, Australia and Tonga — has spoken of the pride he feels in each strand of his identity, and I think it’s great that his sport has given him the chance to represent all of them on the big stage.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: João Cancelo’s attention-grabber

If you’ve only got five minutes and want to understand the state of men’s soccer in Portugal, I’d probably recommend you read the extraordinary statement published by Cristiano Ronaldo — now exiled from the national team — last week.

You might have more fun if you just watch Plot the Ball favourite João Cancelo’s recent goal against Norway on repeat, though. As the fullback stands on the edge of the penalty area, a long throw-in from the left bounces a few yards in front of him. The ball is dipping as it runs across his body; leaning back, Cancelo hits it on the volley and sends it swerving past the goalie into the net. This is a Portugal team full of players of great flair; it’s a shame that their skills are so consistently overshadowed.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPN, Ryan O’Hanlon took a look at the growing number of coaches in men’s international soccer who have had considerable previous success at club level. In his view, the influx is partly because of bigger clubs putting more professional organisational structures in place — and partly down to financial constraints. As he puts it: “AC Milan can’t get a hedge-fund billionaire to donate [Mauricio] Pochettino’s salary, but the US Soccer Federation can — and did, multiple times.”

• For The Hockey News, Ian Kennedy highlighted a push from the International Ice Hockey Federation to have a ‘three-on-three’ variant of the sport included at the 2034 Winter Olympics. (That edition is set to be held in the USA.) The sport’s top women’s league — the PWHL — has opted to use the small-sided version of the sport at its first All-Star Game next year, with ‘PWHL International’, ‘PWHL Rookies’, ‘PWHL Canada’ and ‘PWHL USA’ competing in a four-team round-robin.

• For The Guardian, Matt Hughes reported on the expansion of the biggest league in men’s basketball. The launch of ‘NBA Europe’ has now been delayed to 2028, and top clubs in the continent’s current professional structure just rejected an offer of NBA investment. One interesting aside, per Hughes’ sources: Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez is “eager to establish the principle of a semi-closed league in Europe in case the prospect of a breakaway [soccer] league returns”.

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s special edition of The Week in International Sport, focused on the 2026 Asian Games:

• 🇮🇳 India winning gold in men’s field hockey

• 🇮🇳 India winning gold in women’s field hockey

• 🇨🇳 China winning gold in women’s volleyball

• 🇰🇷 South Korea winning gold in women’s basketball

• 🇯🇵 Japan winning gold in women’s softball

• 🇮🇳 India winning gold in men’s T20I cricket

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the history of T20I cricket in Japan

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kim Do-yeong’s great escape

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇮🇳 India win gold in the men’s field hockey tournament

The history of Pakistan (4.3) in men’s field hockey is on the long list of topics I’d like to investigate more for this newsletter. They won seven Asian Games golds (and many other trophies) between 1958 and 1990 — but have fallen off fairly precipitously since.

They only took bronze in 2026, but it was their best finish in 12 years. Before losing a tight semi-final 4-3 against India (6.1), their only other blemish was a 5-4 defeat to silver medalists Malaysia. After a poor World Cup in August, has their form turned?

🇮🇳 India win gold in the women’s field hockey tournament

The final stage of the women’s tournament looked markedly different to its start. In five pool games, champions India (5.3) scored 66 goals — 19 against Uzbekistan, 17 against Indonesia and 20 against Thailand — while China (5.4) put 46 on the board.

The two teams went head-to-head for gold and scored just once between them. Like China’s semi-final, the bronze game was decided by a shootout after a 0-0 draw; in fact, only three goals were scored (all by India) across the four medal-round fixtures.

🇨🇳 China win gold in the women’s volleyball tournament

At the Asian Games, only women’s volleyball qualifies for inclusion in the Rank the Nations database as a ‘top-level’ international competition; no men’s teams from Asia have made it to the final four of the Olympics or World Championship since 2000.

China (6.2) won gold over Japan (6.0) in straight sets, but their semi-final against Thailand (4.5) went the distance — like their AVC Championship final against the same opponent in August. This time around, it was China who took the fifth set.

🇰🇷 South Korea win gold in the women’s basketball tournament

Japan (5.3) split their squads for the women’s basketball World Cup last month — where they were eliminated in the first knockout round — and the Asian Games. With a weakened team, they still managed to finish second at the latter on home soil.

World Cup quarter-finalists China (6.8) took 10 players — including 7ft 4in 19-year-old Zhang Ziyu — to both tournaments. She scored 22 points on 11 shots in the semi-final, but that wasn’t enough to turn over eventual gold medalists South Korea (5.3).

🇯🇵 Japan win gold in the women’s softball tournament

There’s never been a huge amount of tension in the softball competition at the Asian Games. After China (6.6) took the sport’s first three gold medals during the 1990s, Japan (9.1) have now won seven in a row.

Taiwan (7.1) won all five of their World Cup group matches in June, but lost two tight ones — 4-5 to China and 2-4 to Japan — here. That left them playing for bronze, where they got so far ahead of the Philippines (5.4) that the ‘mercy’ rule was applied.

🇮🇳 India win gold in the men’s T20I cricket tournament

The knockout stages of the men’s T20I cricket tournament started inauspiciously: when all four quarter-finals had to be abandoned because of rain, each semi-final place was allocated to the team higher in the official ICC rankings.

Weather also affected the first semi between Bangladesh (4.4) and Pakistan (5.3), but the rest of the tournament went off without a hitch. India (7.1) — at full strength, unlike the other major nations competing — got the job done pretty comfortably.

📊 Chart of the week: Might T20I cricket really start to take off in Japan?

It’s possible that — looking back — hosting this year’s Asian Games will be seen as an inflection point in T20I cricket’s growth in Japan. However, it’s worth bearing in mind just how early the country is in its development in the sport.

Neither of Japan’s teams has yet had much experience against elite competition: between them, their men and women have played just three official international matches against ICC Full Members. (All three have come this year.) However, the men’s side has had significantly more exposure to the sport’s next tier. Since 2023, they have played 11 times against other nations who have qualified for at least one T20I World Cup; so far, the women have only one such fixture to their name.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kim Do-yeong’s great escape

With a hard-hit infield single to the third-base side of the diamond, Kim Do-yeong didn’t just give South Korea a decisive lead over Japan in the eighth inning of the men’s baseball tournament’s gold-medal game.

He also exempted himself from his country’s rigorous military-service requirements. The KBO star must now complete just three weeks of basic training, rather than serve for 21 months before turning 28. This exemption — for men who win gold at the Asian Games — is controversial in general. But it’s been particularly contentious in this case: their roster of young pros lost to Japan’s amateurs 5-0 earlier in the tournament, before overturning that result — to the great relief of Kim and others — in the final.

You can watch a replay of this hit on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For Nikkei Asia, Mayuko Kurihara reported on the host city of Nagoya’s hopes that the Games would help turn around the region’s stagnating economy. However, pre-event preparations did not go very well: Kurihara noted that “[t]he budget for the event rose to about 370bn yen ($2.4bn), more than triple the original estimate due to inflation, a weaker yen and other factors”. While the city’s main stadium was redeveloped, plans for athletes’ villages had to be shelved.

• For Al Jazeera, Anushe Engineer documented the frustrations of participants with a series of logistical errors and difficulties during the Games. Several teams were bussed to incorrect venues; one individual athlete had three matches scheduled in a 24-hour window. Above all, the decision not to build a proper athletes’ village was widely criticised; instead, competitors had to stay “in hotels, temporary wooden units and on a cruise ship”.

• For The Japan Times, Daniel Hicks covered how organisers had responded to the “noticeable empty seats” at the opening ceremony of the Games — and several events that would typically be expected to draw large crowds. Among those with disappointing turnout were a number of high-profile track-and-field sessions; as Hicks reported, “the 30,000-capacity Mizuho Park Athletic Stadium appeared to be only about one-quarter full on Friday night for the blue-ribbon events”.

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇵🇱 Poland winning a European title in men’s volleyball

• 🇧🇷 Brazil winning a South American title in men’s volleyball

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning two continental titles in men’s volleyball

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning two continental titles in women’s volleyball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the USA’s level in age-grade women’s soccer

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Anna Kristensen’s second effort

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇵🇱 Poland win Men’s EuroVolley 2026

Poland (6.8) led the first set of the men’s volleyball ratings I introduced back in June. They’ve since cemented their status as the sport’s best team: after retaining their VNL title last month, they won a second straight EuroVolley this past weekend.

Not everything went Poland’s way during the first stage of the championship — they lost a tight five-setter to pool hosts Bulgaria (4.4) — but they did turn it on for the knockouts. Across four matches, the defending champions dropped just a single set.

🇧🇷 Brazil win the 2026 Men’s South American Volleyball Championship

I do respect tournaments that eschew a bracket in favour of running a straight round-robin. In the last South American Volleyball Championship, though, the format threw up an unexpected outcome: for the first time, Brazil competed but did not win gold.

Three years on, the hosts decisively took back top spot on the podium. In this edition, Brazil (5.9) won all five of their matches — including their final-day decider against Argentina (5.1) — in straight sets, scoring 58% of the points in the process.

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 men’s NORCECA Final Six and the 2026 Men’s NORCECA Volleyball Championship

I like to think I’ve got a good system to stay across competitive fixtures in the sports I’m tracking, but the scheduling of NORCECA — once again, that’s the ‘North, Central America and Caribbean Volleyball Confederation’ — is making me doubt it.

Consider this an apology for my failure to inform you in a timely manner that the USA (6.3) — between winning August’s NORCECA Pan-American Cup and September’s NORCECA Continental Championship — also won the ‘NORCECA Final Six’ last month.

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 women’s volleyball Pan-American Cup and the 2026 women’s NORCECA Final Six

For good measure, NORCECA also stages its three women’s tournaments in the same August-to-September window. A few weeks ago, I covered Canada (4.7) winning the Continental Championship; the USA (6.4) have since claimed the two other titles.

USA Volleyball send weaker teams to the Pan-American Cup and the ‘Final Six’ — both men’s and women’s — than they do to the Continental Championship; no women in either of September’s two squads had previously appeared for the team in 2026.

📊 Chart of the week: Is the USWNT really struggling at youth level?

Two weeks ago, a below-strength USA team was knocked out of the women’s soccer U20 World Cup by Brazil. After a mixed bag in the group stages — one (big) win, one loss and one draw — they lost on penalties in the round of 16.

This campaign marks the end of an underwhelming decade or so at the age grade for one of the sport’s dominant nations. Since 2016, they have lost eight of the 23 games they played at the U20 World Cup; between 2002 and 2014, they lost just four of 38. Over the last 11 years, they’ve outscored opponents by 0.9 goals per game; during the previous 13, their average margin was +1.7. (These figures — and the chart below — exclude penalty shootouts; also, the first two editions were played at the U19 grade.)

Senior USWNT head coach Emma Hayes has made clear that she’s not happy with how the American system manages top age-grade players. “It's not enough what they do domestically,” she told ESPN in August. “Our players need to have bigger exposures internationally.” If the U20 World Cup does move to an official FIFA release window in future, Hayes will be able to get a better sense of the USA’s true talent level; for now, the only evidence we have suggests that she’s right to be concerned.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Anna Kristensen’s second effort

I’ll admit that I remain a bit fascinated by the distinctive athleticism of top handball players. Last time the sport featured here, it was a shooter’s spring I was highlighting; this time, it’s the balance and flexibility of Denmark goalkeeper Anna Kristensen.

Facing a penalty shot against Romania on Saturday, Kristensen first has to shuffle right in response to an initial dummy. Crucially, however, the 25-year-old is able to stay square to the ball and keep her weight centred. When the taker immediately tries to beat her to the other post, Kristensen can crab back in the opposite direction — with her outside limbs extended — and close the gap that briefly opened by her left hip. At full stretch, she gets a hand to the ball and keeps it out of the net.

You can watch a replay of this save on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Telegraph, Tim Wigmore interviewed Steve Smith about his desire to represent Australia in T20I cricket at the 2028 Olympic Games — as well as his own future in test cricket. Smith was frank about the challenges that batters now face in the red-ball format. Discussing the skills of modern fast bowlers, he said: “Some of those balls are moving two degrees. If you’re hitting that, then you’re probably not a very good batter to be honest, you’re playing down the wrong line.”

• For BBC Sport, Tom English spoke to former Scotland international Mike Blair about his new role as an assistant coach with the New Zealand men’s rugby union team. The All Blacks lost a recent four-match series against South Africa 3-1, but Blair — who oversees the team’s attack — was positive at the end of the tour. “The mental and physical burden was pretty high,” he told English, “but I still believe we created a way of playing that the guys are really passionate about.”

• For The IX Sports, Maren Angus reported from the final group stage of the 2027 Women’s Softball World Cup. In Oklahoma City — where the Olympic tournament will take place in 2028 — the USA won their six games by an aggregate scoreline of 59-0. Angus, however, is concerned: following a quiet invitational tournament at the start of August, this month’s set of fixtures was “the second one hosted by Devon Park this summer that has had pathetic attendance numbers”.

Share

ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning a world title in women’s basketball

• 🇳🇱 The Netherlands winning a European title in women’s 3x3 basketball

• 🇱🇻 Latvia winning a European title in men’s 3x3 basketball

• 🇪🇸 Spain winning a European title in men’s beach soccer

• 🇪🇸 Spain winning a European title in women’s beach soccer

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the audience for a smaller version of water polo

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: the ‘3D skills’ of Suli Batis

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup

Ahead of the FIBA World Cup final yesterday, I felt I had a decent grasp of general sentiment online and in the basketball media: after a scorching run to the gold-medal game, France (6.4) really might stop the USA (7.8) winning a fifth straight title.

My ratings provided a sanity check. The USA had clearly been the stronger team over the last five years, and — in the end — their pedigree prevailed. As France fell behind — as a two-point half-time lead turned into an 16-point deficit by the end of the third quarter — I felt that sense of possibility quietly dissipate. Despite a couple of tight games, in aggregate the US played close enough to their pre-tournament level to take home another trophy: across their six games in Berlin, they scored 58% of the points.

Did we all get too excited about a fun-to-watch French team, then? I don’t think that’s quite fair. The gap between the two teams does remain vast: the USA are way ahead of the pack, and France are only fifth in my rankings. However, their performances this year do suggest a real step forward. From 2022 to 2025, France scored 54% of the points in their competitive fixtures; in 2026, that figure rose to 59%. If they’re able to keep playing at that level, the 2030 World Cup will be a different proposition.

🇳🇱 The Netherlands win the women’s 2026 FIBA 3x3 Europe Cup

The European championship in 3x3 basketball also finished this weekend. Compare the nations competing for a spot on the women’s podium to those at the five-on-five World Cup and you get a sense of the small-sided sport’s diversity.

Azerbaijan (5.1) beat Slovenia in yesterday’s third-place game; the Netherlands (6.5) won a third title in four years by beating Spain (6.2). The second-place finishers are the only country of the four to have played at a five-on-five World Cup since 2000.

🇱🇻 Latvia win the men’s 2026 FIBA 3x3 Europe Cup

There might be a few more familiar names near the top of men’s 3x3 in Europe — France (5.3) and Serbia (6.5) contested the third-place game yesterday — but the current champions are far from a traditional basketball power.

Latvia (6.6) have only ever taken part in the men’s five-on-five World Cup once, but are now the top nation in men’s 3x3 basketball: their win over the Netherlands (6.0) in the Europe Cup final followed their 3x3 World Cup win in Poland earlier this year.

🇪🇸 Spain win the 2026 Men’s Euro Beach Soccer League

Spain (6.1) winning a men’s beach soccer title might not be a surprise at first glance, but this year’s EBSL win was their first since 2006. It’s Italy (7.3) — host of the final week of fixtures — who have been the team to beat in Europe in the last few years.

Both recorded big semi-final wins — over Denmark (4.1) and Switzerland (5.8) — before Spain prevailed 5-2 in the final. One more surprising name to make last week’s final eight was Moldova (3.9); they beat Germany (3.3) in the seventh-place playoff.

🇪🇸 Spain win the 2026 Women’s Euro Beach Soccer League

Hosts Italy (6.3) and Spain (7.9) contested the women’s EBSL final — as well as the men’s — in Viareggio yesterday. The ultimate outcome was the same, but the match was closer: the visitors needed extra time to win 4-3.

This Spain team has now won three EBSL titles since 2022. Six of this year’s squad of 14 were also champions in 2022 and 2023, including Andrea Mirón; the 35-year-old scored more goals than anyone else across last week’s fixtures.

📊 Chart of the week: Is there a market for a new form of water polo?

At the end of August, World Aquatics launched a new small-sided form of water polo — dubbed ‘water polo 4x4’, or ‘WP4’ — in a picturesque harbour in Croatia. The aim: “to attract new audiences and broaden the sport’s appeal”. How did its debut go?

World Aquatics broadcast the ‘4x4 Open Championships’ — contested by men’s and women’s national teams — for free, but interest was muted. This year, they have also streamed four age-grade tournaments in full on YouTube; the gold-medal matches in three of them have been viewed more times than the final session of this tournament, which featured the four bronze and gold matches in one stream. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed WP4’s faster pace — but it remains to be seen if wider success will follow.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: the ‘3D skills’ of Suli Batis

The more field hockey I’ve watched this year, the more I’ve noticed commentators referencing ‘3D skills’. It’s as simple an idea as it sounds: in congested areas, players often lift the ball off the playing surface to help them move it into more space.

It dawned on me that it could be a useful concept in beach soccer, too. Think about one of the goals scored by Suli Batis at the EBSL finals. In Spain’s 11-10 (!) win over Switzerland, he initiated a ‘one-two’ with a teammate — but received the return pass with his back to the net. No matter: he kept the ball up with two right-foot touches, and sent it a couple of metres higher with his third. That created the space for him to leap into a bicycle kick, which sailed over the head of his marker and into the goal.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Guardian, Sarah Rendell spoke to two women’s rugby union players from England and Wales about the sport’s ‘smaller ball trial’, which began this past weekend at senior international level. The new ball weighs the same as a full-size ball, but is slightly smaller by volume. Rendell reports that previous trials — at age-grade level, and in rugby sevens — resulted in “positive feedback”; World Rugby will formally canvass top 15-a-side players at the end of this international window.

• For ESPN, Jeff Kassouf looked at the USA team that’s currently in Poland for the U20 women’s soccer World Cup. (In their three pool games, they recorded one big win, one draw and one loss.) A number of professional players still eligible for this age-grade weren’t made available by their NWSL clubs. The team’s manager said: “What's sad sometimes is when a player is desperate to represent their country and they're not being released, that's something we can't control.”

• For The Athletic, Eden Laase reported on the flow of women’s basketball talent from France to North America. There are more French players in the WNBA than ever — when Marine Johannès moved over in 2019, she was the only one — and young prospects are more likely to consider playing at NCAA level to develop further. The financial incentives are also hard to ignore. One college coach said: “now, with the money, everyone sees a benefit in having these kids go”.

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇹🇷 Turkey winning a European title in women’s volleyball

• 🇹🇭 Thailand winning an Asian title in women’s volleyball

• 🇨🇦 Canada winning a continental title in women’s volleyball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the style of the top teams in men’s rugby union

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Cecilia Zandalasini’s sweet stroke

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇹🇷 Turkey win Women’s EuroVolley 2026

In my current women’s volleyball rankings, the highest-rated nations are relatively well dispersed across continents. Four of the top eight teams are from Europe, though — and all four of them reached the latter stages of EuroVolley 2026 this past weekend.

In the third-place game, Serbia (5.4) beat Poland (5.9); Italy (7.0) and Turkey (6.2) — ranked first and third — contested the final. It was the 2026 VNL champions who took out another major title, and Melissa Vargas claimed another tournament MVP.

🇹🇭 Thailand win the 2026 AVC Women’s Volleyball Continental Championship

The two Asian teams currently in the top eight are Japan (6.0) and China (6.1) — but it was Thailand (4.4) who won last month’s Continental Championship. Along with the trophy, they secured qualification for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

China lost the final, but were outscored by just a single point over five sets. All 14 of their players were also part of their VNL panel this year, but the team skewed younger than Thailand’s: they took four teenagers, while the champions brought none.

🇨🇦 Canada win the 2026 Women’s NORCECA Volleyball Championship

Before you ask: NORCECA is the rather unfamiliar-looking abbreviation for the ‘North, Central America and Caribbean Volleyball Confederation’. Eight teams played in this year’s women’s Championship, and Canada (5.0) beat the USA (6.2) in the final.

The USA are the only team from this region in my top eight; Canada currently rank 13th. Cuba finished third at NORCECA, but haven’t played enough top-level games over the last five years to get a rating; the Dominican Republic (5.2) came fourth.

📊 Chart of the week: What can Americans expect from ‘Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry’?

“We play this way and they play that way. Sometimes we win and sometimes they do.” In one respect, Rassie Erasmus — head of South Africa’s men’s rugby union team — was probably too generous to New Zealand after another tight win on Saturday.

Since 2022, the All Blacks have won only four of 12 matches against their rivals. In his stylistic assessment, however, Erasmus was spot on. The ongoing ‘Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry’ series — which will finish in Baltimore (USA) this Saturday — has been a true contrast in approaches. While New Zealand have kept the ball in hand and tried to move it quickly across the field into space, South Africa still rely on their traditional strengths: defensive organisation, set-piece power and accurate kicking.

This chart plots each team’s attacking performances in those head-to-head matches during the last five years. New Zealand average 183 completed passes and offloads per game to South Africa’s 117; the Springboks have recorded the lower tally by this metric 12 times out of 12. The Kiwis’ skill and daring mean the rivalry has remained compelling even as South Africa have gained the upper hand. Erasmus himself was effusive at the weekend: “All of us, I think, envy the way they handle the ball.”

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Cecilia Zandalasini’s sweet stroke

For some countries at the women’s basketball World Cup — like the USA and France — working out how to share the ball between their top players will be a difficult task. For others who don’t have lots of WNBA talent, it’s an easier proposition.

Italy fall into the second category. Cecilia Zandalasini is one of two players on their roster currently playing in the world’s best league; in their first game — a win over the Czech Republic — she took 20 of the team’s 63 shots. The forward’s sublime touch was on show in the fourth quarter on Friday: with less than a second left on the shot clock, Zandalasini found space behind the screen of one teammate, caught an inbounds pass from another and arced a high fadeaway jumper through the net.

You can watch a replay of this shot on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For Scouted, Stephen Ganavas investigated Poland’s potential re-emergence as a force in men’s soccer. The Eastern European nation finished third at the World Cup in both 1974 and 1982, but hasn’t made it past the round of 16 since then. The recent improvement of its domestic league is striking: it was “ranked the 30th best league in UEFA’s coefficient as recently as 2022/23, behind countries such as Hungary, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Bulgaria. It’s now in the top 15.”

• For Cricinfo, S Sudarshanan reported on the return of Hong Kong to the women’s T20I cricket Asia Cup after 14 years. Captain Natasha Miles has played county cricket in England; coach Mamatha Maben has led top-level teams in her native India. The team’s success has led to more financial backing, too: most women’s players receive an income from either the national governing body or the Hong Kong Sports Institute, which oversees athletes in Olympic sports.

• For the Sydney Morning Herald last month, Jon Pierik revealed that Australia’s men’s basketball coach met Ben Simmons — top pick in the 2016 NBA Draft — to discuss a possible return to international play ahead of the Olympics. Simmons hadn’t played a game since 2025, but subsequently signed a contract with an NBA team last week. Since his 2013 debut, the 30-year-old has committed to play several international tournaments before ultimately withdrawing.

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇨🇦 Canada winning a Pan-American title in men’s field lacrosse

• 🇩🇪 Germany winning a world title in men’s field hockey

• 🇦🇷 Argentina winning a world title in women’s field hockey

• 🇫🇮 Finland winning a European title in women’s American football

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing France’s talent level in women’s basketball

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Mitchell Starc’s early start

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇨🇦 Canada win the 2026 Pan-American Men’s Lacrosse Championship

Every gold medal in the history of the men’s field lacrosse World Championship — as well as 10 of 14 silvers — has been won by a North American team. The first edition of the sport’s Pan-American Championship, then, was more than just a regional qualifier.

At next year’s Worlds, the USA (8.4) will be out for revenge: Canada (7.9) came back late from a three-goal deficit to take the inaugural PALA title a week ago. (At the last edition of the global tournament in 2023, the Americans beat their rivals 10-7 in the final.) To their recent fourth-place finish at the women’s Worlds, the Haudenosaunee (6.7) added a bronze medal after beating hosts Jamaica (4.4); the Caribbean nation and Puerto Rico (5.0) were the other teams to secure their spots for 2027.

Qualifiers from the Asia-Pacific confederation will also be worth watching in Japan next year. The host nation — currently fifth in my ratings — receives an automatic World Championship place; Australia (6.0), New Zealand (3.9) and the Philippines (7.1) will all be there, too. The Southeast Asian country has only just played enough top-level matches to qualify for a rating, but a silver medal in their regional qualifier back in January is evidence that they shouldn’t be taken lightly.

🇩🇪 Germany win the 2026 Men’s FIH Hockey World Cup

Germany (6.0) have a bit of a mixed recent record in men’s field hockey. Over the last five years, their best finish in the FIH Pro League has been fourth — but, in that time, they’ve also won two World Cups and one EuroHockey Championship.

The Germans beat Belgium (6.4) in the last World Cup final; this year, it was Spain (4.6). Between the two tournaments, they experienced quite a lot of squad turnover: of the 18 players named yesterday, only eight were also involved back in 2023.

🇦🇷 Argentina win the 2026 Women’s FIH Hockey World Cup

On the women’s side, the almost unthinkable happened: the Netherlands (8.7), who had won 100 of their 107 competitive fixtures since 2022, lost Saturday’s World Cup final to Argentina (7.4) — on home soil — in a shootout after drawing 1-1 in regulation.

A theme of the knockout stages was the Dutch team’s inability to generate scoring opportunities from penalty corners. They earned 11 such chances per game over their first five fixtures; between the semi-final and final, they had just five in total.

🇫🇮 Finland win the 2025-26 IFAF Women’s European Championships

What will be the fate of international American football if the IFAF can successfully grow its non-contact sibling (flag) across the globe? While the latest edition of the Women’s European Championships did just conclude, there are already warning signs.

Finland (6.4) beat Germany (4.5) to take the title — but Great Britain (4.1) couldn’t field a team for the third-place playoff. It’s also not clear if or when the IFAF World Championship — last held in 2022, and won by the USA — will take place again.

📊 Chart of the week: What will France bring to the FIBA World Cup?

Can anyone actually challenge the USA at the upcoming women’s basketball World Cup? A few months ago — after the FIBA global qualifiers — I picked out France as a team to keep an eye on. What sort of team are they bringing to Germany this week?

In short: lots of effective top-level role players, but no ball-dominant stars. This chart plots the number of minutes per game played by each player in the WNBA this season against the number of shots they take per game. As a group, the eight WNBA players named in France’s squad average 23 minutes per game, and attempt 14 field goals every 36 minutes; by comparison, players picked by the USA for the tournament have recorded 37% more WNBA playing time this year, and taken 14% more shots.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Mitchell Starc’s early start

We’re currently in a particularly rich part of the men’s test cricket calendar. Between July 25th and September 13th, nine World Test Championship matches have been scheduled to take place; in theory, that’s 45 days of top-quality cricket.

In practice, though, not all of those matches have gone the distance. In Australia’s second test against Bangladesh, their left-arm fast bowler Mitchell Starc was the culprit: the 36-year-old took 10 wickets in just 120 balls as the match finished with three days to spare. Starc — who has a reputation for striking early — didn’t waste any time, either: he moved the first delivery of the test away from Bangladeshi opener Shadman Islam and had him caught in the gully off a leading edge.

You can watch a replay of this wicket on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For LockerRoom, Suzanne McFadden looked back at a turbulent year for women’s netball in New Zealand. Last September, coach Noeline Taurua was temporarily suspended as a result of player complaints; a few weeks ago, she led the team to Commonwealth gold. One of those who backed Taurua during her absence was captain Karin Burger. After the Games, she was unequivocal: “she feels so much love for us. It makes you drive to want to play your best netball for her.”

• For Associated Press News, Jay Cohen reported on alleged financial misconduct in the WPBL — the professional women’s baseball league launched in the USA earlier this year. One investor — who also sits on the league’s board of directors — has requested access to company records as a result of what their legal filing described as “apparent conflicts of interest, potential misappropriation of…assets, and an undisclosed familial relationship among…insiders”.

• For The Conversation, Marco Antonsich wrote about Italy’s changing identity as a sporting nation after its men’s soccer team missed the World Cup this summer. The country then excelled at the European Athletics Championships earlier this month, with five golds won by individuals “from diverse ethnic backgrounds”. Lots of top athletes are now (per Antonsich) “new Italians”, but many face persistent racism. Volleyball star Paola Egonu is one who has been targeted repeatedly.

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇨🇦 Canada winning a world title in women’s flag football

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning a world title in men’s flag football

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning a Pan-American title in men’s volleyball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing squad turnover in Dutch women’s field hockey

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Duco Telgenkamp’s smash hit

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇨🇦 Canada win the 2026 IFAF Women’s Flag Football World Championship

Will flag football be two automatic gold medals for the host nation at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028? Not on current evidence. After last week’s World Championship, the landscape on the women’s side of the sport is particularly interesting.

The USA (7.9) do come out as the top-rated team below — just — but Mexico (7.9) are essentially level with them in second. (I use win rate as a tie-breaker, and the Americans are a few points ahead.) Between them, they had won the last five major global tournaments. However, it was Canada (6.8) who won this year’s Worlds: they beat Mexico in the semi-finals by 20 points to six, before defeating the USA 27-20 in yesterday’s gold-medal game. All three have now confirmed their places at LA28.

How am I thinking about the Americans’ Olympic chances? A reason to be optimistic about their potential is the fact that they introduced a new quarterback — 17-year-old Hawai’i native Akemi Higa — at this tournament. It’s a decision that could pay off at the Games — especially if her twin sister, who she played with on the junior national team last year, breaks through at wide receiver. “When we need it,” Higa says, “we are able to find each other on the field.” It turns out the USA might just need it.

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 IFAF Men’s Flag Football World Championship

The USA (8.4) did manage to win the men’s Worlds in Düsseldorf at the weekend, but had one hiccup — and another close call — along the way. In the group stages, they lost to minnows American Samoa; Japan (6.1) then ran them close in the semis.

In general, though, the competitive picture is less compelling on the men’s side of flag football. Mexico (6.8) are the second-best team in my ratings, and came fourth at the Worlds — but there’s clear daylight between them and the Americans for now.

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 men’s volleyball Pan-American Cup

The USA (6.1) didn’t take any of their men’s Volleyball Nations League finals squad to last week’s Pan-American Cup in Mexico. Instead, they sent a 14-player squad with seven current student-athletes in it — and still won the competition outright.

This strategy isn’t always sufficient for success; at the same competition in 2025, the Americans finished sixth. The international calendar rolls on next month, with the USA competing again in the NORCECA Championship — last held in 2023 — in Canada.

📊 Chart of the week: Is this still the same dominant Dutch hockey team?

Over the next few weeks, the Netherlands will be hoping to win their fourth straight women’s field hockey World Cup. Their recent record is formidable — but how many of this year’s squad were also part of their successes in 2014, 2018 and 2022?

Xan de Waard is the one player to have appeared at all four World Cups over the last 12 years; four played in both 2018 and 2022, and five won their first title in 2022. 10 returners is one fewer than they brought last time around: 11 of their 2018 squad also played four years later. However, their starting line-up remains experienced. Only two World Cup rookies started the team’s first game against Chile, and one of them — 29-year-old forward Marijn Veen — scored one of the team’s goals in a 2-0 victory.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Duco Telgenkamp’s smash hit

The men’s field hockey World Cup runs simultaneously with the women’s in Belgium and the Netherlands this August. The Dutch got off to a strong start, with a 5-1 win over New Zealand — and a clip of their second goal yesterday stopped me mid-scroll.

After the Black Sticks kept out a penalty corner attempt early in the second half, Duco Telgenkamp — who had been attacking the right-hand goal post — controlled the rebound with a smart first touch. His second protected the ball from the defender over his left shoulder; his third brought it into space towards the centre of the ‘D’. With his fourth touch, he made a sublime connection on his reverse side and rifled the ball into the left corner. Just like that, the co-hosts had their first lead of the tournament.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPNCricinfo, Alex Malcolm investigated what Australia’s bowling attack in men’s test cricket might look like after their current first-choice pace quartet — all 33 or older — retires. There are several exciting out-and-out quicks coming through the system; their issue has been staying fit — in particular, avoiding stress fractures to the back. “Some people say it’s like a rite of passage,” said 20-year-old Callum Vidler. “But I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t have to go through it.”

• For The Cutback, Neel Shelat analysed Nigeria’s surprising quarter-final exit from the women’s soccer African Cup of Nations. Their defeat by Cameroon followed a loss to Malawi; South Africa then beat them in a play-off, so they will miss the World Cup for the first time. Shelat wonders if the country’s federation might have started to take the team’s success for granted; ahead of WAFCON, “[t]he NFF scheduled friendlies against three African opponents ranked outside the top 70”.

• For her newsletter, Katie McInerney wrote up a visit to Harvard Stadium to watch one of the first games ever played in the Women’s Lacrosse League — the field lacrosse competition newly set up in the USA as a counterpart to the PLL, a men’s franchise league. For now, the PLL’s owners have elected to tether the two closely together: “The WLL and PLL played alongside each other this summer, with women’s games sandwiched between the men’s at most tour stops.”

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning a world title in women’s field lacrosse

• 🇵🇱 Poland winning a world title in men’s volleyball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the overall popularity of team ball sports

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Vikki Wall’s strong shoulder

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 World Lacrosse Women’s Championship

Last week’s edition on the Commonwealth Games meant that a number of events slipped into today’s newsletter. It’s a shame, as I’ve been dying to write about the Haudenosaunee for quite a while.

The World Lacrosse Women’s Championship finished up last Sunday, and this union of Iroquois tribes indigenous to the east of North America — granted permission by the sport’s governing body to compete as a standalone nation — came fourth for the first time ever. With a rating of 4.5, they don’t crack the top six of my first set of field lacrosse rankings below; with an estimated population in the low six figures, however, they certainly stack up well against the nations above them on a per-capita basis.

Lacrosse will return to the Olympics in 2028 in the ‘sixes’ format — but it’s not clear the IOC will allow the Haudenosaunee to participate. This was already a difficult question for organisers. (The modern sport descends from games played hundreds of years ago by indigenous American peoples, but the nation doesn’t yet qualify to set up a National Olympic Committee.) Their women’s side finishing one win away from a medal at this year’s field lacrosse Worlds will make it an even more contentious one.

🇵🇱 Poland win the 2026 FIVB Men’s Volleyball Nations League

Poland (6.8) are currently the strongest team in men’s volleyball by a margin; they have just won their second straight VNL title, and a third in four years. The USA (6.0) finished second in this year’s edition, after losing the final in five sets.

While that result was in line with expectation, Slovenia (5.8) turning over higher-rated Japan (6.0) in the third-place game was more of a surprise. The European nation had lost at that stage — and ultimately finished fourth — in each of the last two editions.

📊 Chart of the week: Are team ball sports really that valuable?

I’m conscious that I’ve not written about tennis or golf at all this year. Thinking about them and other sports I’ve excluded by choosing to re-scope the newsletter to focus on team ball sports, I’ve wondered: how much of the sporting world am I neglecting?

Data published by sports consultancy firm Two Circles earlier this year sheds a bit of light. Assets in team ball sports accounted for more than two-thirds of all revenues generated by global sporting IP in 2025, per their latest report; individual ball sports like golf and tennis accounted for just a 4% share. Even more stark, though, is the split within this broad category: really, it’s soccer — which takes slightly more than a quarter of all revenue from sporting intellectual property by itself — and everything else.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Vikki Wall’s strong shoulder

I’m cheating again. This week’s highlight is actually from last weekend — and it’s from a sport I’m not formally tracking for ‘Rank the Nations’. Australian rules football’s inaugural ‘Australia v Ireland’ game was far too good to pass over, though.

46 Irish women are contracted to play in the AFLW this season; almost all of them grew up playing Gaelic football, which remains entirely amateur in their home country. One of the moments of the match in Sydney actually came from a player in their ranks who has professional experience in a third sport. A clean hit by former rugby sevens international Vikki Wall in the fourth quarter made it clear that Ireland — even if well behind on the scoreboard — weren’t going to let the locals push them around.

You can watch a replay of this hit on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Athletic, Sabreena Merchant reviewed the 12-player squad selected by the USA for September’s FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup. Where the 2024 Olympic team prioritised experience, this group has had an injection of youth; four women 24 or younger have been selected for a major tournament for the first time. Caitlin Clark is in after a controversial omission in Paris; as Merchant put it, “this is a USA Basketball roster that every casual fan will be able to recognize”.

• For ESPNCricinfo, Firdose Moonda spoke to the chair of Namibia Cricket ahead of the country co-hosting the 2027 men’s ODI World Cup. Late format changes have upset players from smaller ‘Associate’ nations (including Namibia) who now face elimination before the official group stage even begins. He didn’t offer much sympathy, advising them to focus instead on the shorter T20I format: “if you look at popularity for ODI cricket, we don't really know where it is going”.

• For the Los Angeles Times, Thuc Nhi Nguyen reported on how the city used this year’s men’s soccer World Cup to prepare for the 2028 Summer Olympics. Some parts of the city are hoping to maximise the benefits of LA28 by focusing on fans’ experience. Santa Monica — which “balked at the chance to host competitions” — aims to be a hub for extracurricular activity. “I think major global events have an extractive history,” its mayor said. “We are trying to change that.”

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s special edition of The Week in International Sport, focused on the 2026 Commonwealth Games:

• 🇳🇿 New Zealand winning gold in women’s netball

• 🇦🇺 Australia winning gold in women’s 3x3 basketball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing which leagues attract the most netball talent

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kyle Jimenez’s circus shot

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇳🇿 New Zealand win Commonwealth gold in the women’s netball tournament

At this year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Australia won more than twice as many gold medals as any other nation. In women’s netball, however, they had to settle for bronze after Jamaica knocked them out in the semi-finals by a single goal.

The Diamonds’ 45-46 loss on Saturday was certainly surprising. Was it really — as the official Glasgow 2026 social media account put it — ‘one of the biggest upsets in the history of netball’? My ratings provide a different slant. At the conclusion of the Games, Australia (7.4) and Jamaica (7.1) are the sport’s top two nations; heading into their final-four encounter, their respective ratings were 7.6 and 7.3. Framing this match in that way does the recent record of the Caribbean country a major disservice.

The Sunshine Girls have done very well at major tournaments over the last five years. They beat Australia in the pool stages of the 2022 Games, knocked out New Zealand (6.0) in the semis and went on to win silver; at the 2023 World Cup, they were third. Even without star shooter Jhaniele Fowler this time around, this year’s final against the Kiwi Ferns was a great chance for Jamaica to claim gold. A 48-56 loss yesterday to a clearly weaker team — by my accounting, at least — was a disappointing end.

🇦🇺 Australia win Commonwealth gold in the women’s 3x3 basketball tournament

Australia (6.8) did manage to win gold in women’s 3x3 basketball, though. This was their team’s second major title of the year, after winning the Asia Cup back in April; they also reached the final of the FIBA World Cup in June, before losing to the USA.

In second place were Uganda, who haven’t played enough matches over the last five years to qualify for a rating in the format. In fact, this is the first Commonwealth or Olympic medal the nation has ever won in a team ball sport.

📊 Chart of the week: Where do the world’s top netballers play?

While neither made the gold-medal game, Australia and England pretty clearly have the strongest domestic leagues in netball. Of the 144 players selected for this year’s Games, 57 — or around 40% — played in either SSN or the NSL earlier in 2026.

Of the two, which is stronger? While England’s Netball Super League sent one more player to the tournament than Suncorp Super Netball did, much of its talent was from comparatively weaker nations: for instance, bottom-half finishers Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had 11 NSL players on their squads. SSN, in contrast, furnished the strongest sides with their talent: Australia’s entire squad of 12 plays at home, as do three current English internationals, five Jamaicans and five Kiwis.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kyle Jimenez’s circus shot

A men’s 3x3 tournament was also contested at this Games — but doesn’t qualify for inclusion in Rank the Nations. Why? Since 2000, no Commonwealth nations have recorded a top-four finish at the Olympic 3x3 tournament or the FIBA World Cup.

But the sport did produce one of the highlights of Glasgow 2026 for the home crowd. With just over a minute left in their first knockout game, Scotland led Malaysia 19-16. Kyle Jimenez held the ball, but was pinned deep into a corner by his defender as the 12-second shot clock wound down. As he turned and lost his balance, the 28-year-old’s only option was to fling the ball over his left shoulder and hope. The two-pointer dropped in without hitting the rim, and sealed a spot in the semi-finals for the hosts.

You can watch a replay of this shot on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For BBC Sport, Matthew Henry asked where the Games go from here. Glasgow 2026 was a “stripped-back” edition, after the Australian state of Victoria pulled out of hosting; only 10 sports were included this year, down from 20 in 2022, and only existing venues were used. These changes did successfully reduce the financial impact of the Games, per Henry’s reporting: “Costs of running the event have been cut from between £700m and £800m…to £160m for Glasgow.”

• For ESPN in 2024, Sunaadh Sagar reported on how India — who will host the 2030 edition of the Games in Ahmedabad — would be impacted by the decision to reduce the number of sports played this year. (“Of the 210 Indian athletes that took part in Birmingham, 98 took part in sports that have now been axed.”) The South Asian nation won silver in women’s T20I cricket and men’s field hockey in 2022, as well as bronze in women’s field hockey; all were absent in 2026.

• In June, Pacific Media Network asked the Chief Executive of Commonwealth Sport about how Pacific nations would be impacted by the dropping of rugby sevens. Fiji have won four silvers and a bronze in seven men’s tournaments, and one silver in two women’s tournaments; Samoa have also played in every men’s tournament. Her response wasn’t that convincing: “I understand the importance of sevens…but we were in a situation where a decision had to be made.”

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇯🇵 Japan leading the way in women’s baseball

• 🇹🇷 Turkey winning a world title in women’s volleyball

• 🇬🇷 Greece winning a world title in men’s water polo

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning a world title in women’s water polo

• 🇵🇱 Poland winning a European title in women’s rugby sevens

• 🇫🇷 France winning a European title in men’s rugby sevens

🇯🇵 Japan lead the first edition of the women’s baseball rankings

Like softball, women’s baseball is really a two-horse race between Japan and the USA. The former is much more even, though: the two have each won three of the last six women’s softball World Cups, but Japan have held the baseball title since 2008.

Like softball, the sport currently uses a distributed World Cup format, too. Last week, the Americans did manage to steal a march on their Asian rivals: they got to play their group-stage matches for the 2027 edition of the tournament first, and closed the gap in the rankings below. Before this edition of the World Cup formally began, Japan had a ‘Rank the Nations’ rating of 9.2 — 0.4 points ahead of the USA. After five American wins by an aggregate scoreline of 102 runs to 12, that margin has halved.

Japan will have an opportunity to extend their lead again at the end of August, when they play their first five games in Taiwan. The hosts — ranked fifth above — will be the second-best team in this second qualifying group, while the sixth-ranked Philippines (5.3) and 10th-ranked Venezuela (3.8) will also be competing there. The nations in third and fourth — Canada (6.4) and Australia (6.1) — were both on the USA’s side of the draw, and qualified for the final stage next July without any real trouble.

🇹🇷 Turkey win the 2026 FIVB Women’s Volleyball Nations League

Turkey (6.2) won their second women’s VNL title over the weekend in Macau. Back in 2023, they beat China in the final; this time, it was Brazil (6.6). (Both times, Melissa Vargas — who featured in the newsletter last month — was named tournament MVP.)

Turkey were pushed hard by Brazil, only outscoring them by 99 points to 93 in total. Their earlier final-stage victories were more convincing: they beat Canada (4.8) and China (6.0) in the quarters and semis, scoring 55% of the points in those matches.

🇬🇷 Greece win the 2026 FINA Men’s Water Polo World Cup

Hosts Australia (4.3) were the only country from outside Europe to make the top eight of this year’s FINA Men’s Water Polo World Cup. They ultimately finished fourth, having beaten defending champions Spain (7.1) in a quarter-final penalty shootout.

Following a second-place finish in 2025 — their first medal at the competition in almost 20 years — Greece (6.6) took World Cup gold for the first time ever this year, beating Hungary (6.1) by a single goal in yesterday’s final.

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 FINA Women’s Water Polo World Cup

The women’s World Cup ran concurrently with the men’s, and the final was between the two top-rated teams in my system: the USA (7.3) beat Spain (7.1) by 13 goals to nine. Notably, though, Spain’s semi-final opponent was Russia.

They returned to top-level competition after World Aquatics lifted their ban earlier in the year. After overturning the Netherlands (6.8) at the quarter-final stage, Russia ended up in fourth place after losing the bronze-medal game to Australia (5.9).

🇵🇱 Poland win the 2026 Rugby Europe Women’s 7s Championship Series

Every summer — after the end of World Rugby’s annual global sevens tour — Rugby Europe runs a two-leg European Championship. It’s typically an opportunity to take the sport further afield: the 2026 tournaments were held in Germany and Croatia.

On the women’s side this year, Poland lost in the final of each leg — to France (6.5) in Hamburg, and to Ireland (4.8) in Split — but two second-place finishes were still enough for them to sit at the top of the overall standings.

🇫🇷 France win the 2026 Rugby Europe Men’s 7s Championship Series

After finishing second in Hamburg, France (6.0) won the men’s edition of the Split leg yesterday — and with it the overall European series title. In second place were Italy, who haven’t competed in the World Series for over a decade.

France won despite heavily rotating from their first-choice squad: they named 23 different players in their squads across these two European events, but only five of them had played in the final event of the World Rugby calendar back in June.

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇪🇸 Spain winning a world title in men’s soccer

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing South Africa’s level in age-grade rugby union

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kathy Garcia’s pick and shovel

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇪🇸 Spain win the 2026 men’s FIFA World Cup

The ‘experts’ had a pretty good FIFA World Cup. When I reviewed predictions made by the DTAI Sports Analytics Lab at KU Leuven at the outset of this edition, they had Spain, Argentina, France and England as the four most likely teams to win outright.

Those four nations were ultimately the four semi-finalists. While I wouldn’t yet rely on my basic rating system to predict match outcomes in any sport, I was pleased to see that yesterday’s two finalists — Argentina (7.7) and Spain (7.2) — were the top two teams in my first set of men’s soccer rankings, too. After a dominant performance and an eventual 1-0 win in extra time, Spain have become the first nation ever to hold both the men’s and the women’s FIFA World Cup titles simultaneously.

Along with Portugal, they are one of only two countries to have a rated team in all six versions of the game that I’m tracking for this project: both the men’s and women’s versions of the 11-a-side outdoor sport, as well as futsal and beach soccer. All six Spanish teams have a current rating of at least six out of 10 — and five are ranked inside the top four of their sport. (Men’s beach soccer — eighth — is the outlier.) No other country has a stronger active claim to be the ‘home of soccer’ than Spain.

📊 Chart of the week: Are South Africa unstoppable in age-grade rugby?

They didn’t top the first rankings I published last week, but South Africa would make a strong case that they’re the current home of men’s rugby union. To go with World Cup titles in 2019 and 2023, they’ve also had a lot of success at age-grade level.

On Saturday — while one of their top eligible players made his senior debut for the Springboks — their U20 side won a second consecutive Junior World Championship final. Can the rest of the world keep up? Actually, it’s not quite that simple. As I’ve written about men’s rugby union and rugby sevens this year, I’ve often highlighted how much more competitive these codes have become. It’s true at this level, too: weaker nations have eroded much of the margin that used to separate top U20 teams.

The chart above splits the history of the U20 JWC into two periods. From its launch in 2008 until 2019, team strength was highly variable: two top-tier nations — New Zealand and South Africa — scored more than 60% of the points in their matches, while two others had a point share below 40%. However, since restarting after a multi-year break in 2023, the competition has become much more tightly contested: over the last four editions, every elite nation is between 40% and 60% by this metric.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Kathy Garcia’s pick and shovel

Some of the highlights I’ve featured in this section recently haven’t been particularly subtle ones. In this edition, though, my favourite play is one that became even more impressive the more I watched it closely.

Last week, Puerto Rico were competing in the group stages of the women’s softball World Cup. In their final game against Japan, infielder Kathy Garcia completed an out by collecting a hard-hit ground ball and transferring it to her teammate covering second base. After taking the ball on the first bounce at full stretch, Garcia doesn’t bother shifting it back to her stronger side to make a throw. From her knees, she uses her glove to shovel the ball the last few feet and beat the runner on first by a second.

You can watch a replay of this play on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPN, Jeff Passan reported on negotiations between LA28 officials, Major League Baseball and the league’s Players Association regarding the participation of top men’s talent in the next edition of the Olympic Games. Several players have publicly stated their interest, but off-field questions remain unresolved. A union adviser said: “the MLBPA is seeking fair treatment for its members in consideration for the substantial financial value they would bring to LA28.”

• For Cricinfo, S Sudarshanan contextualised India’s win over England in the one-off women’s test match at Lord’s last week. Because of a domestic calendar that reserves some time for red-ball cricket, many of the away side’s players — unlike the hosts’ — had considerable experience in the longer format of the game. After the match, England batter Heather Knight called for her own board to follow suit and provide more opportunities to develop test skills below international level.

• For Sky Sports, Adam Bate analysed the performance of Spain’s 19-year-old central defender Pau Cubarsí at this year’s men’s soccer World Cup. Along with teammate Lamine Yamal, he is one of just six teenagers in the tournament’s history to have started the final and ended up on the winning side. Cubarsí’s ability on the ball is already exceptional, but he was also part of a defensive unit that conceded only one goal in their eight games over the last five weeks.

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• ☘️ Ireland leading the way in men’s rugby union

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the possible end of Russia’s sporting exile

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Jude Bellingham’s sense of destiny

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

☘️ Ireland lead the first edition of the men’s rugby union rankings

The caption of a YouTube video published by ITV explaining men’s rugby union’s newest international competition protests: ‘We don’t have friendlies in rugby’. The Nations Championship doesn’t sit well with some of the sport’s exceptionalists, then.

The inaugural edition — which will run annually during the July and November test windows, and ostensibly imbue their fixtures with more competitive stakes than they had in the past — finally got underway two weekends ago. I’m a fan of the change for several reasons. One: we have already seen France (7.2) — firmly in the sport’s top tier, along with Ireland (7.3) and South Africa (7.1) — start to bring stronger squads with them to the Southern Hemisphere on their summer tours.

To see the impact of this new competitive structure, compare their win over Australia (3.5) this past weekend to their second fixture of the July window last year. (In both years, their first July fixture was impacted by the comparatively late finish of their domestic league season.) 12 months ago, France’s starting line-up contained players who in total had made only seven starts during the 2025 Six Nations; their team in Brisbane on Saturday combined for 20 in this year’s edition of the tournament.

📊 Chart of the week: Where is Russia’s sporting exile most notable?

The 30 team ball sports that I track for the ‘Rank the Nations’ project are overseen by 14 different official bodies, but on the question of Russia’s status in international competition they have been largely united since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The last time the country appeared in my results database was on February 14th that year, when the Russian women’s basketball team beat Puerto Rico in a FIBA World Cup Qualifying Tournament. However, the International Olympic Committee ended its formal suspension of Russia last week; in the aftermath of that decision, it will be interesting to see if this cross-code unity holds. When the news came out, I was curious: in which sports had Russian teams been performing strongly before the war?

I might have guessed that ice hockey would appear near the top of this list: the men’s side had the third-best win rate of any Russian team from July 2020 until the invasion. The two above them were more surprising. Their men’s beach soccer team won the World Cup a third time in August 2021; then, on February 6th the next year, their men came second at UEFA Futsal Euro 2022. It made me a bit uncomfortable to learn that they reached the final — mere days before the war — by beating Ukraine in the semis.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Jude Bellingham’s sense of destiny

Goals in soccer don’t always feel inevitable — but they do after Jude Bellingham has scored them. In England’s win over Norway on Saturday, it was their 23-year-old star who hunted down a rebound in extra time and swept it over the line. Who else?

In fairness, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was Erling Haaland being lauded as a ‘killer’ today, had a loose ball happened to have fallen at his feet at the right time. And herein lies the issue for English fans: crucial goals feel inevitable when they’re scored by Lionel Messi of Argentina, too. Get past their semi-final opponents, and it might be Kylian Mbappé of France waiting for them in New York. It’s a sad fact of major international tournaments that there’s never quite enough destiny to go around.

You can watch a replay of this goal on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Cutback, Callum McCarthy reported on a new investment deal struck by Liga F — the organisation that oversees the top level of women’s club soccer in Spain. He views it as “a huge commercial risk”: each club that has opted in will receive an up-front cash injection, but in exchange private investors will receive a considerable share of revenue going forward. The league is now seeking bidders for its media rights, having opted out of its existing broadcast deal a season early.

• For Yahoo! Sports, Jeff Eisenberg wrote about the decision of Nikola Kusturica — a 17-year-old from Serbia — to play NCAA basketball next season instead of remaining with his EuroLeague club. He impressed in the recent FIBA U17 World Cup, scoring 37 points in a loss against the USA in the final, and some scouts consider him a contender to go first overall in the 2028 NBA Draft. How much money will he be paid in college? “[A] sizable amount," per Eisenberg’s reporting.

• For Good Areas, Jarrod Kimber covered the England women’s team’s first ever day of test cricket at Lord’s. Before last week, they had played 55 home test matches across 10 decades — but not a single one at the ground widely known as the ‘home of cricket’. Most striking to Kimber were the differences between its typical audience and the fans who travelled across London to the game on Friday: “Even before you got to the ground, it was clear this was not a normal Lord’s Test.”

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇦🇺 Australia winning a world title in women’s T20I cricket

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing India away from home in ODI and T20I cricket

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Mario Hezonja’s fast hands

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇦🇺 Australia win the 2026 Women’s T20 World Cup

Australia’s spell without a world title didn’t last long: in the T20I cricket World Cup final at Lord’s yesterday, they comfortably beat hosts England to cap off an unbeaten seven-game run through the tournament.

England (6.8) had also won six from six ahead of the decider, but were granted a marginally easier path through the pool stage — even leaving home advantage aside. Australia (7.6) had to beat South Africa (5.6) and India (5.5) — the third- and fifth-ranked teams below — to qualify from their group, while the hosts overcame fourth-ranked New Zealand (5.6) and sixth-ranked West Indies (5.2). (According to my rating system, the two weakest teams at the World Cup — Scotland (2.8) and Ireland (2.8) — were also in England’s pool.)

Most remarkable about the performance of the eventual winners was the even spread of contributions they got from their many stars. Cricinfo — the sport’s publication of record — calculated a context-adjusted ‘impact’ score for every player in every match at this World Cup. On a per-game basis, the three highest-rated Australians — Ashleigh Gardner, Ellyse Perry and Phoebe Litchfield — sat in 21st, 22nd and 23rd place in the website’s ‘most valuable player’ rankings at the end of the tournament.

📊 Chart of the week: Do India’s cricket teams struggle away from home?

India have had plenty of good days in white-ball cricket in recent years. Last Sunday — when the men’s team lost a T20I series to Ireland for the first time, and the women were knocked out of the T20I World Cup in England — was one of the bad ones.

How much did these poor results have to do with exposure to unfamiliar conditions in a different part of the cricketing world? That specific question isn’t easy to answer. However, we can easily check whether Indian teams have performed better in general in competitive white-ball matches held closer to home. (For this analysis, I’ve grouped together all T20I and ODI tournaments organised by the ICC and hosted by India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan or Bangladesh so far in the 21st century.)

A couple of poor showings at tournaments they hosted mean that India’s women actually have a worse record in their home region than they do elsewhere. The men’s team, however, does seem to struggle a bit: their white-ball win rate drops from 80% in South Asia to 73% in other countries. It’s particularly interesting to note — given the upset on Irish soil — that their level drops most significantly in the shorter format. In ODIs, their win rate falls by about three percentage points; in T20Is, it’s almost 15.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Mario Hezonja’s fast hands

Really, this section should belong to Lionel Messi. (Or Sidny Lopes Cabral.) If you’re keen on soccer, though, you’ll already be following the FIFA World Cup. Even if you’re a basketball fan, you might not be watching the ongoing FIBA World Cup qualifiers.

Mario Hezonja was a top-five NBA draft pick back in 2015 whose North American career didn’t quite pan out as hoped. The 31-year-old has been back in Europe since 2020, and still represents Croatia internationally. Against weaker opponents — like Cyprus, say, who they beat by 73 points on Friday — his talent still shines through. In one second-quarter sequence, Hezonja showed off his skills by nabbing a steal at one end of the court and whipping a one-handed overarm pass for an assist at the other.

You can watch a replay of this assist on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For Expecting Goals, Michael Caley summarised just how impressive Cape Verde were at this year’s men’s soccer World Cup. Argentina needed extra time to beat them in the first knockout round on Friday; they also held Spain to a 0-0 draw in the pool stages. It wasn’t simply a fluke of a low-scoring sport, either: “they put in performances rated just as strong as those of far more famous [footballing] nations like Croatia, Belgium and Uruguay on the underlying numbers”.

• For Stuff, Louis Herman-Watt spoke to the parents of Anton Segner, a 24-year-old born in Germany who has just been called up to New Zealand’s national rugby union team for the first time. After interacting with Kiwi coaches at home in Frankfurt, he emigrated at 15 to finish his education there. “[T]here was no chance to stop him,” his father said. “First you think, ‘okay that's a weird idea’, and then you start working on it, and then ‘okay, we understand it's your big dream’.”

• For CNBC, Alex Sherman reported on the Premier Lacrosse League’s expansion plans after the competition announced last week that it had raised another $100mn from investors. Its co-founder hopes that the 2028 Olympics in the USA will increase public interest in the league, and they intend to open up franchises to private ownership in the next few years. International teams will play a modified ‘sixes’ format in Los Angeles, while PLL teams play traditional field lacrosse.

Share

ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇩🇪 Germany winning a world title in men’s beach handball

• 🇦🇷 Argentina winning a world title in women’s beach handball

• 🇧🇪 Belgium winning a world title in men’s field hockey

• 🇳🇱 The Netherlands winning a world title in women’s field hockey

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the USA’s level in age-grade men’s basketball

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Melissa Vargas’ emphatic spike

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇩🇪 Germany win the 2026 Men’s Beach Handball World Championship

Have you ever been watching a sport like soccer and thought: ‘that goal was so good it should count twice?’ You might enjoy beach handball. Right there in the rulebook is the provision that two points are to be awarded for ‘creative or spectacular goals’.

Fans of sweeping national stereotypes will therefore be delighted to see Brazil (7.0) at the top of the first set of men’s rankings below; even as the Seleção fail to win many admirers at the FIFA World Cup, o jogo bonito seems to survive elsewhere. You might also think it’s fitting that they’ve assumed this position despite coming up short in major tournaments over the last five years: to go with two bronze medals at the World Games, they have finishes of third and second at the World Championship.

That silver medal was awarded just yesterday, having lost the final of the 2026 World Championship to Germany (6.3) in fairly convincing fashion. This year’s winners have comfortably the best record of any team other than Brazil; beneath them, a group of four European teams are bunched tightly together. Argentina (4.9) only rank 10th overall at present, but might be on the rise: they beat hosts Croatia (5.9) yesterday to claim bronze and secure their best World Championship finish.

🇦🇷 Argentina win the 2026 Women’s Beach Handball World Championship

In women’s beach handball, there’s little doubt that Argentina (6.4) are on the rise: their World Championship gold yesterday followed a silver at the previous edition in 2024, and a first-place finish at last year’s World Games.

The South Americans are currently fourth in the women’s rankings. Their standing is impressive given their lack of pedigree in the sport’s more popular sibling: they’re the only top-six nation which doesn’t also qualify for a rating in women’s indoor handball.

🇧🇪 Belgium win the 2025-26 Men’s FIH Pro League

As well as taking them to an overall victory in this year’s edition of the Pro League, the performances of Belgium (6.5) over the last few months have closed the gap on the Netherlands (6.8) at the top of my men’s field hockey ratings.

An interesting quirk of this Dutch team: they fared unusually poorly in shootouts. During 2025-26, they lost the decider in all five of the games they drew in normal time; just a season earlier, they had won seven Pro League shootouts out of seven.

🇳🇱 The Netherlands win the 2025-26 Women’s FIH Pro League

A shootout loss to Australia (5.3) on Saturday was the only blemish on the Women’s Pro League record of the Netherlands (8.7); they won their other 14 games in normal time, and finished far ahead of the competition at the top of the standings.

They were particularly impressive in attack, scoring 56 goals in total — 25 more than the next-most prolific team. Yibbi Jansen led the overall scoring chart with 15 herself, all from penalty corners; teammate Pien Dicke was the top scorer from open play.

📊 Chart of the week: Is the USA’s lead in men’s basketball really eroding?

Once again in 2026, the NBA’s MVP award was won by someone brought up outside the USA. While it’s been eight years since the best player in men’s basketball was an American, the country’s development pipeline is clearly still bursting with talent.

Don’t believe me? Look at their results in recent age-grade tournaments. At the 2024 U17 World Cup, the USA recorded their best performance ever: they won their games by 64 points, on average. Several players from that class — those born during 2007, including last week’s top NBA draft pick AJ Dybantsa — then went on to lead their country to an U19 World Cup win in 2025. This year’s U17 crop have started well, too: so far in 2026, they’ve won their two games by a combined total of 93 points.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Melissa Vargas’ emphatic spike

Sometimes you spot an athlete and know immediately that you’ll get a lot of joy out of watching them perform. That was my feeling with Nahid Rana — highlighted in this space a couple of weeks ago — and it’s the case with Melissa Vargas, too.

For starters, Vargas has a fascinating story: she first played volleyball for Cuba at 13, but emigrated later in her teens after a dispute with the governing body. She became eligible for Turkey in 2023, and has led them to several medals since. However, the 26-year-old is also just a jaw-dropping athlete: she combines a 1.94m frame with an explosive leap and tidy ball skills. One successful third-set spike against China in the VNL last week stuck with me for a while; all I can suggest is that you watch it, too.

You can watch a replay of this point on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For The Observer, Cameron Ponsonby wrote about the recent success of New Zealand in men’s test cricket, despite having the smallest population of any nation playing the format. One choice made by the governing body has been to prioritise foreign exposure: in 2018, they shifted funding from the domestic red-ball competition to development tours overseas. As a former coach put it: "[w]e are giving a large number of players international experience at different levels”.

• For The Guardian, Sid Lowe reported on the plight of Uruguay manager Marcelo Bielsa before his team were knocked out of the men’s soccer World Cup on Saturday. Several players had complained about how he had treated them in private, and his public comments ahead of their final pool game were withering. Contrasting himself to Spain coach Luis de la Fuente, he said: “the reality is that his football is much more beautiful than what I’ve managed with my team”.

• For MLB.com, Jesse Borek covered an eye-catching hitting display from Rintaro Sasaki at the league’s draft combine. In an unusual move for a top baseball prospect, he left Japan in 2024 — after breaking the high-school home-run record — to go to college in the USA. Now 21, Sasaki has had only limited success at NCAA level: he was a roughly average hitter this year, and “could potentially land anywhere from the [seventh] to the 12th round” of the 2026 draft.

Share

ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇺🇸 The USA leading the way in women’s softball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing ball-in-play trends in international volleyball

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Nahid Rana’s high heat

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇺🇸 The USA lead the first edition of the women’s softball rankings

The distributed World Cup format — where a number of nations host pool-stage games several months before knockouts take place — is more common than I realised before I started following international sport more systematically for this newsletter.

That’s why — in this edition — I’m able to a write a sentence like ‘the 2027 Women’s Softball World Cup starts this week’ and not expect emails of correction in response. Group A matches in the latest edition of the global tournament begin in the Czech Republic tomorrow; Group B — hosted by Peru, but headlined by reigning champions Japan — will take place next month, and Group C is scheduled for September in the USA. The Americans currently top my ratings, but not the official WBSC rankings.

When we do eventually get to the knockout stages, don’t be surprised if it comes down to an elimination game between the USA (9.2) and Japan (9.0). While the Americans lost the last World Cup final to their rivals, they’ve had a slight advantage at the World Games: they won both the gold-medal game in 2022 and their semi-final in 2025 by a single run. Taiwan (6.8) — competing in Group A — are another team to watch: they have four top-three finishes at major tournaments in the last five years.

📊 Chart of the week: Does volleyball have its own ball-in-play crisis?

I think it’s fair to say that ‘ball-in-play time’ is a concept that’s garnering more media attention than it used to — not just in Premier League soccer, where conversation on the topic really took off this season, but in many team ball sports.

Even a game of discrete events like volleyball is having its own version of this ‘crisis’. In both of last year’s Nations League competitions, the percentage of match time that the ball spent in play decreased, according to the most recent edition of the global governing body’s annual technical report. On the men’s side, per the FIVB, this figure dropped from 14.5% in 2024 to 12.2% in 2025; there’s still more ball-in-play time on the women’s side, but theirs also fell by a couple of percentage points last year.

The main culprit was the system for challenging line calls. There were more calls than ever challenged by teams in 2025 — and the amount of time each review lasted was longer on average, too. What’s been done in response? It’s simple, really: for the 2026 Nations League, the FIVB has changed some rules to streamline the process and speed games up. I’m always pleased to see proactive administrators in circumstances like this; it remains to be seen if the Premier League will take similar action.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Nahid Rana’s high heat

Key to Bangladesh’s first win over Australia in men’s ODI cricket for 21 years last Tuesday was the fast bowling of Nahid Rana. The right-armer claimed four wickets in the match; each of them came on balls delivered quicker than 146 kph.

High pace alone is difficult to deal with, but pace paired with consistent accuracy leaves batters with few good options. When Australian debutant Liam Scott faced his fourth ball of the match, his team’s hopes of victory were already fairly slim. After a short ball from Rana reared up towards his ribs and he parried it to a diving catcher, they had practically vanished. The appreciation of subtlety has its place in analysis of elite sport, but sometimes it’s hard to look past the most obvious of an athlete’s skills.

You can watch a replay of this wicket on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• On Substack, Neil Paine compared the current iteration of Brazil’s men’s soccer team to its predecessors. While their title odds for this World Cup are historically low — they drew their first pool game against Morocco on Saturday — their overall performance level hasn’t dropped off as much as you might think: “they mostly have had a stable winning percentage across the many decades since their rise, even during the comparatively less successful recent period”.

• For the Sporting News, Stephen Noh reported on the widespread popularity of basketball in the Philippines. The country is “the NBA’s No. 3 market”, according to Noh, and both teams in this year’s Finals had a player of Filipino heritage on their roster. “You go to anywhere that’s middle income or below, you will see a makeshift basketball court,” a local journalist said. “Even if they don’t have basketball shoes, people play in their flip flops.”

• For the Sydney Morning Herald, Iain Payten spoke to Maddison Levi — star of the Australia women’s rugby sevens team — about her surprisingly fast return from injury for the final event of this year’s World Series. Having torn a knee ligament eight days earlier, Levi came back for the end of the knockout stage in Bordeaux — and didn’t seem to do herself any more damage: “I played the last two games, and now I’m here back in the knee brace again, to help with the recovery.”

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This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇿🇦 South Africa winning a world title in men’s rugby sevens

• 🇦🇺 Australia winning a world title in women’s rugby sevens

• 🇱🇻 Latvia winning a world title in men’s 3x3 basketball

• 🇺🇸 The USA winning a world title in women’s 3x3 basketball

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the favourites for the men’s soccer World Cup

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Sydney Schertenleib’s frozen rope

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇿🇦 South Africa win the 2026 Men’s SVNS World Championship

I’d argue that World Rugby has overseen a real levelling of the competitive playing field in the sports it oversees — on the men’s side, at least — since rugby union turned professional during the 1990s.

I’ve written previously in this newsletter about how the gap between European nations and the traditional Southern Hemisphere powers has closed in the 15-a-side version of the sport; look at men’s rugby sevens, too, and there is clear evidence of the top nations’ advantages being competed away in recent decades. Eight of the first nine World Series titles between 2000 and 2008 were won by New Zealand; over the last nine editions of the year-long competition, five different teams have finished on top.

It’s also clear enough in the ‘Rank the Nations’ ratings: the three top-ranked nations at the conclusion of the latest edition of the World Series — Argentina (6.6), Fiji (6.6) and New Zealand (6.5) — are almost inseparable, while the World Championship title was actually won by South Africa (6.1), currently ranked fourth. Argentina are a real success story here: they finished in the top four of the overall ladder only once between 2000 and 2008, but have four such finishes in the last five seasons alone.

🇦🇺 Australia win the 2026 Women’s SVNS World Championship

Australia (7.9) peaked at the right time during the 2025-26 women’s rugby sevens season, winning two of the three postseason World Series events to pip New Zealand (8.5) to the overall World Championship title.

Their recent record still isn’t as strong as the Kiwis’, whether you look at it over five years or a shorter stretch of time. So far in 2026, Australia have scored 69% of the points in their matches; New Zealand’s point share remains notably higher at 76%.

🇱🇻 Latvia win the 2026 FIBA Men’s 3x3 World Cup

Latvia (6.5) beat Germany (5.0) in the final of the men’s 3x3 basketball World Cup yesterday, finally adding a gold medal at the competition to their previous silver (in 2019) and bronze (in 2023).

Their opponents are on an upward trajectory, though. Silver this year followed a fourth-place World Cup finish in 2025; they were also fourth in last year’s Europe Cup. Prior to 2025, Germany had never finished higher than ninth in either tournament.

🇺🇸 The USA win the 2026 FIBA Women’s 3x3 World Cup

The final of the women’s 3x3 tournament — which ran alongside the men’s in Poland — was contested by the USA (7.1) and Australia (6.6). They were the two top-ranked nations in the sport entering the World Cup, and remain so at its conclusion.

The USA took the title with a 21-20 victory, backing up a 21-18 pool-stage win over the same opponents. In the semi-finals, however, the Americans did need overtime to beat Azerbaijan (5.1), who knocked them out of the Champions Cup in March.

📊 Chart of the week: Who’s flying under the radar at the FIFA World Cup?

Last week, I linked to some men’s soccer World Cup predictions made by the DTAI Sports Analytics Lab at KU Leuven. What do we learn by comparing their forecast to the public’s predictions? (Pew surveyed 3,507 Americans back in March.)

Let’s first dispense with some bias in favour of two of the hosts; both Mexico and the USA are among the nine contenders named in the Pew survey, but don’t appear as high on the DTAI Lab’s list. Conversely, two teams not singled out by the public are among the experts’ top nine: the Netherlands — who, per the DTAI Lab, have the seventh-best chance of winning the World Cup outright — and Colombia. The latter face Portugal on June 27th; it could be one of the better games of the pool stages.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Sydney Schertenleib’s frozen rope

Spain’s win over England on Friday — part of the latest set of UEFA qualifiers for the next women’s soccer World Cup — was a reminder to Barcelona fans of what they have just lost: it was powered by two goals from departing superstar Alexia Putellas.

Across Europe that same evening, however, were glimpses into the club’s future. Kika Nazareth scored twice for Portugal in a win over Latvia; the pick of the goals from Barça players, though, came from the right foot of Switzerland midfielder Sydney Schertenleib. Early against Malta, the 19-year-old won possession near halfway with her back to goal. She turned, carried the ball forward until she was a couple of paces outside the box and arrowed the ball towards the top corner with effortless power.

You can watch a replay of this goal on YouTube here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPNCricinfo, Hemant Brar reported on Afghanistan’s hopes of more regular exposure to top competition in men’s test cricket. This week’s match in India is only their 13th since 2018, and they’re yet to play against most of the sport’s other top nations. Their board is trying to force top players to spend more time in red-ball cricket by limiting how much they play in shorter formats. An assistant coach of the team said: “We want them to respect and play our domestic cricket".

• For Yahoo! Sports, Jack Baer covered the latest update from the commissioner of the NBA on the league’s planned launch of an affiliated franchise competition for men’s basketball in Europe. The league is pitching ‘NBA Europe’ — currently expected to launch in 2027 — as a 16-team competition; some participants will be existing professional clubs, and some will be “groups who…want to launch teams in cities that don't have top-level basketball right now”.

• For Fangraphs, Jay Jaffe described the technical changes made by Roki Sasaki and the Los Angeles Dodgers at the start of his second season pitching in MLB. The 24-year-old — who represented Japan in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, but opted out of this year’s edition — had been performing at a much lower level than expected after moving to the USA; in recent weeks, however, his outings have improved on the back of “better command and [a] reconfigured repertoire”.

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇵🇱 Poland leading the way in men’s volleyball

• 🇮🇹 Italy leading the way in women’s volleyball

• 🇫🇮 Finland winning a world title in men’s ice hockey

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the global popularity of test cricket

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: Ivar Stenberg’s show-stopper

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇵🇱 Poland lead the first edition of the men’s volleyball ratings

Volleyball — the indoor version, that is — was the only ‘net sport’ to make the cut for this project. (As an aside: I’ve not included beach volleyball, as it’s contested by pairs of players rather than ‘national teams’ — even at events like the Olympic Games.)

The nature of these sports is such that top competitors can squeeze an exceptionally high win rate out of a seemingly small advantage at the level of individual points. So it is with Poland (6.7), who are the dominant team in men’s international volleyball at present. They have won just 53% of their points in competitive play since 2022 — but 82% of their matches. That’s been enough to bring in a tidy haul of medals during this period: two Nations League golds and an Olympic silver, among several others.

Second-ranked Italy (6.5) have won points at a similar rate to their rivals, but have fewer outright wins to show for it. The result of this trend is a serious squeeze in the middle of the pack. 20 nations have played enough men’s volleyball matches over the last five years to qualify for the rankings above; 17 of those 20 teams have won between 48% and 52% of their competitive points since 2022, and currently have a ‘Rank the Nations’ rating between 4.0 and 6.0.

🇮🇹 Italy lead the first edition of the women’s volleyball ratings

Women’s volleyball is a little more dispersed than the men’s game: top-ranked Italy (7.0) have won 54% of their points since 2022. They currently hold three major global trophies: Olympic gold, the World Championship and the Nations League title.

When the 2026 edition begins this week, in fact, they’ll be seeking their fourth Nations League title in five years. Last year’s losing finalists Brazil (6.7) are one of Italy’s closest challengers, along with China (6.3), the USA (6.1) and Turkey (6.1).

🇫🇮 Finland win the 2026 Men’s Ice Hockey World Championship

Host nation Switzerland (5.7) had a dominant run through this year’s Men’s Worlds, winning their first nine games of the tournament by 48 goals to eight in aggregate. In yesterday’s final, however, they lost 0-1 to Finland (5.9) in sudden-death overtime.

The third-place playoff also went against recent form, as Canada (7.2) — who went unbeaten in pool play — lost 2-3 to Norway (3.9). The Nordic country’s bronze medal represents their best-ever finish in a major men’s ice hockey competition.

📊 Chart of the week: Is test cricket really that unpopular?

One sport I was surprised not to see near the top of my ‘popularity score’ rankings a few weeks ago: test cricket. That list drew on Google Trends data; to investigate further, I plotted search activity for ‘cricket’ in general — leaving formats aside.

As the chart indicates, peak interest is driven by the flagship event in men’s ODI cricket: the 50-over World Cup, which takes place every four years. The World Test Championship was instituted in 2019 to provide men’s test cricket with a better competitive structure and more context for casual followers, but it doesn’t yet appear to have captured their imagination; the latest final — contested by Australia and South Africa at Lord’s during June 2025 — barely registers in the data above.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: Ivar Stenberg’s show-stopper

I try to spread out my coverage across different sports each week, and we’ve already briefly covered the latest in men’s international ice hockey. However, Ivar Stenberg’s goal for Sweden against Slovakia last Tuesday stopped me in my tracks.

The 18-year-old will be one of the top selections in this year’s NHL Draft. His skating isn’t rated that highly by scouts, but he showed real poise after carrying the puck across the blue line in the second period. The forward first angled his body towards the centre of the offensive zone; then, when the Slovak defender trailing him turned his shoulders inwards, he swivelled back into open space on his forehand side. His “high-end” shot — per The Athletic’s draft guide, at least — took care of the rest.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• On their blog, Jesse Davis and Pieter Robberechts of the DTAI Sports Analytics Lab at KU Leuven published their predictions for the upcoming men’s soccer World Cup. No team has a better than one-in-four chance of winning the tournament outright, but Spain are the academics’ current favourites: according to their model, the winners of the 2024 European Championship have “the strongest offense and second best defense in the tournament”.

• For the Sydney Morning Herald, Christian Nicolussi reported on the impact of the major changes to player eligibility instituted for the first time in this year’s men’s rugby league ‘State of Origin’ series in Australia. Players who represent other ‘tier one’ teams — New Zealand and England — in international competition are no longer barred from playing in Origin. Of those picked for last week’s series opener, “up to 15…could take on host nation Australia at this year’s World Cup”.

• For his newsletter, Simon Blanford analysed how often the top nations in women’s field hockey score goals in different team-strength scenarios. During what he calls ‘unbalanced play’, the scoring rate of the ‘numbers-up’ team does increase, but the opposite effect is more pronounced. “[T]here is a general decline in goal scoring when a team loses a player…falling from about 3.5 goals a game to less than one. Effectively teams do not score when they lose a player to a card.”

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ICYMI

This year at Plot the Ball, I’m using data to try and better understand the landscape of international team sport. For some background to this project — which I’m calling ‘Rank the Nations’ — you can read my introductory post here.

Subscribe now

In today’s edition of The Week in International Sport:

• 🇦🇺 Australia leading the way in women’s ODI cricket

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England winning a European title in women’s rugby union

• 📊 Chart of the week: assessing the history of men’s rugby league in Australia

• ⏪️ Highlight of the week: John Tavares’ tournament opener

• 💭 A few other interesting things I learned

🇦🇺 Australia lead the first edition of the women’s ODI cricket ratings

For the first time since 2018, Australia don’t currently hold the World Cup in either white-ball format of women’s cricket: neither T20Is nor ODIs. They’ll have a chance to regain the T20 World Cup this July, but it will be a longer wait in the 50-over game.

Last year’s ODI World Cup was a seminal moment, as India — a modern powerhouse of men’s cricket, at least in its white-ball formats — won their first major trophy in the women’s game. According to my rankings, however, it’s too early to declare a true shift in the balance of power in ODI cricket. Taking all competitive fixtures over the last five years into consideration, Australia (7.5) are still rated much higher than any other team. India (6.1) do sneak into second place, just ahead of England.

Also included in these ratings are fixtures in the ICC Women’s Championship; over a multi-year period, a set number of bilateral series between top-ranked teams count towards the IWC table. (England just hosted New Zealand in one such series.) Australia have won all three editions so far, and 88% of their IWC matches in total since 2014. No other team has won more than 65% of their fixtures during this period; when that gap begins to close, I’ll start to question whether the Aussies are still on top.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England win the 2026 Women’s Six Nations Championship

England (8.9) won their eighth consecutive European title in women’s rugby union yesterday, convincingly beating their main rivals in the competition away from home. France (6.8) have now finished second overall in seven Six Nations in a row.

How are England trending? At the end of last year, they had a 9.0 rating — so their level has actually dropped a little. Compared to 2025, other Six Nations teams scored one point per game more against them this year — and conceded three points fewer.

📊 Chart of the week: Who’s on top of men’s rugby league in Australia?

I’ve not written much about international rugby league so far this year. In fact, the highest representative honour in the sport might be selection for Australia’s ‘State of Origin’ series; per Google, global search interest is higher than it is for the World Cup.

So — ahead of this year’s men’s Origin series kicking off next week — I’m cheating a bit in this edition. What would applying the methodology of ‘Rank the Nations’ to the history of rugby league matches between New South Wales and Queensland reveal? Entering 2026, the two states are almost neck and neck. While Queensland have won eight of 15 matches over the last five years, NSW remain marginally ahead as a result of scoreline dominance in their wins: all seven have come by 10 points or more.

⏪️ Highlight of the week: John Tavares’ tournament opener

One potential first-overall NHL Draft selection — 18-year-old wing Gavin McKenna — ultimately chose not to play in the men’s ice hockey World Championship this month. Still, top picks have been the centre of attention for Canada at this year’s tournament.

Macklin Celebrini (picked first in 2024) made headlines after being named captain at 19. That decision became more striking when national-team legend Sidney Crosby (2005) joined their roster late — and didn’t take his ‘C’ back from Celebrini. When the action began, however, it was John Tavares (2009) who entered the spotlight. After a teammate brought the puck up the ice early in their first game against Sweden, he broke towards the net at just the right time to receive a pass and bury a great chance.

You can watch a replay of this goal on Instagram here.

💭 What else I learned last week

• For ESPNCricinfo, Osman Samiuddin contextualised Pakistan’s state of precarity in men’s test cricket after losing to Bangladesh on Monday. In his view, “on-field results feel more than ever like they're catching up to the continuing degradation in the way the game is run off it”: the national governing body — currently helmed by a sitting government minister — is burning through both chairs and head coaches, and “no annual financial statement has been made public since 2023”.

• For WNBA.com, Brian Martin covered the influx of talent from overseas into the top women’s basketball league in North America. After it expanded to 15 teams for the 2026 season, a record 51 players born outside the USA have appeared on a WNBA court already this year. That number is likely to grow as the season progresses: “several players still fulfilling overseas commitments” are contracted to franchises and expected to join up with them over the next few months.

• For ESPN, Sam Marsden reported on Spain’s attempts to persuade Lionel Messi to represent them — and not Argentina — in men’s international soccer during the early 2000s. Their intent set off a mad scramble inside the Argentine Football Association, culminating in an age-grade friendly being arranged to capture his eligibility. A local journalist recounts: “For [his] first Argentina call-up, the AFA sent the fax to Barcelona with his name misspelled, written ‘LEONEL MECCI’.”

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